Echoes from the past. One of the books I enjoyed reading most this year was 1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin, a New York Times commentator and broadcaster. It is the story of the extraordinary stock market crash of October that year, which foreshadowed – though was not entirely responsible for – the Great Depression.

In the run up to the crash – as they do today with the AI revolution – investors were telling each other that “this time is different”; that there was a combination of circumstances, then based on rising consumerism and big profits in industry and telecommunications, which meant stocks were seen as a one-way bet. There are also other parallels – notably a cast of larger-than-life characters in business and finance, pressure on the US central bank, the Fed, to cut interest rates and on government to cut regulation.

The public was caught up in the frenzy and clever bankers had developed schemes that allowed the public to buy “on margin” – putting up only a portion of the price, often as little as 10 per cent, and borrowing the rest. This all worked just fine when share prices were going up. But when they started to fall it set off a tragic downward spiral leading to financial ruin for many and eventually a string of bank failures, many caused by runs as savers desperately looked for their money back. Only a........

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